The China Project

The China Project will map how countries, initially the U.S. and China, could minimize the cost of a shift to a cleaner global energy system by playing to their own economic strengths as they race to scale it up. Among other things, the project, led by Jeffrey Ball, will analyze cross-border U.S.-China clean-energy investment and how it's changing.

The Steyer-Taylor Center will hold several workshops over the next few months as part of the research project into China’s solar industry. The research documents and analyzes changes underway in China’s solar industry, the world’s largest; it assesses what those changes suggest about China’s comparative advantage in the fast-growing global solar industry; and, from those comparative-advantage insights, the research suggests policy moves that countries might take to reduce the cost of scaling up solar energy for the world.

The project has been, for the past few academic terms, the subject of a Stanford Law School policy lab that has involved students from Stanford schools including law, business and engineering. The policy lab has been taught by Jeffrey Ball, the project’s leader, and Dan Reicher, the Steyer-Taylor Center’s executive director, with close assistance since fall 2014 from Xiaojing Sun and Caitlin Pollock, the project’s co-managers of research.

On May 27 and May 29, 2015, in Beijing, the project principals held workshops to discuss their preliminary research results at the Stanford Center at Peking University. Workshop attendees will include solar-company executives, government officials, scientists and other solar experts from China. The project principals will hold a workshop in Washington, D.C., in July, and one on the Stanford campus in September. The project will culminate in the release of a comprehensive report by early 2016.